Page 20 of Again with Feeling

Then the next text came through:When did we change his name to Bobby?

Fortunately, texts don’t automatically pick up your brain waves and translate them into words. Otherwise, Hugo would have gotten a message that looked something like this:uhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh

It was easier to fix the problem than to examine it too closely. I went back and changed the name to Dexter; that’s what we’d been calling our ex-Army gumshoe. Then I sent a text that said:Sorry, I don’t know what happened there.

The silence on Hugo’s end lasted almost a full minute before he replied,Okay.

Another message came through a moment later:Ready to keep going?

Oh. Right. The story.

I turned my attention to the screen, trying to remember what we’d discussed would happen next, but my brain kept flashing back to Bobby’s name slipping out of my fingertips, and Bobby standing in the half-moon of the apartment building’s porch light, and Hugo’s silence until that single, horribleOkay.

I’ve spent a lot of my life wishing for catastrophes—you know, spontaneous sinkholes, an unexpected meteorite through the head (was it a meteor or a meteorite? I should definitely look that up), even something as banal as a heart attack. But, of course, those things never happened when you needed them. (Being abducted to be the bride of Sasquatch was my recent favorite, but believe it or not, the big hairy brute had never once crashed through the window and carried me off at an opportune moment. Not even the time Keme walked in when I was opening my new underwear. And I don’t care what he tells you, theydomake superhero-themed underwear for adult men.)

So, it was a tremendously gratifying surprise when something crashed upstairs.

I dashed—yikes!—off a text to Hugo that said,Hold on, emergency, and sprinted out of the den.

In the upstairs hall, I paused to listen. Sounds came from Bobby’s room, and it took me a moment to recognize what I was hearing: something being dragged over a rug.

Since moving into Hemlock House, I’d had an unexpectedly high number of unwanted visitors—usually people who wanted to kill me. I guess that came with the territory of being an amateur sleuth, so I should have expected it, but let me tell you: it put a real damper on surprise parties. It also made me wary of investigating sounds I didn’t recognize. I did a quick mental rundown: Keme would never have gone in Bobby’s room without permission (in contrast to my room—see the story above), and neither would Millie or Fox or Indira. For that matter, as far as I knew, nobody else was home. Indira had gone to the farmer’s market, and Bobby was working.

So, who was in his room?

Hugo.

No, I told my brain. That would make for a great twist if my life were a particularly soap-opera-y mystery novel, but it definitely wasn’t Hugo.

Unfortunately, I didn’t have any other flashes of inspiration.

I did, however, have a way to find out without barging in on a potential killer.

Here’s a quick rundown on Hemlock House: it’s big, it’s beautiful, and it was built by a crazy man. All three of those statements are pretty much objective facts. Hemlock House was a sprawling manor that, by my best guess, had started off with a Georgian floor plan and then evolved through several phases until it had all the best Victorian eccentricities. It had damask wallpaper and parquet floors and chandeliers and fireplaces and so many oil paintings of horses. It had a LOT (in Millie-speak) of taxidermy animals, and if you looked closely, you could finda hedgehog smoking a pack of Lucky Strikes. It had bone china and silver mirrors and mantel clocks that every mystery writer dreams of turning into a murder weapon. And—to my eternal delight, because I’m a thirteen-year-old boy at heart and have never grown up—it was riddled with secret passages.

One of which I’d discovered when I’d been, uh, monitoring Keme.

(Monitoring sounds better than spying on, and, to be fair, Keme did need adult supervision, whether he believed it or not.)

A section of paneling in the servants’ staircase opened easily when I pressed the catch hidden in one of the stiles. I slipped through the opening into a dusty hallway. For a moment, I worried about tipping my hand by leaving footprints; Keme didn’t know I knew about this space, and I didn’t want him to feel like I’d invaded his privacy. At the same time, he was a minor, and he slept here more often than he did at home—wherever home was, since Keme refused to tell me anything about that part of his life. And we (the rest of us) all agreed that, in spite of Keme’s independence, he still needed, well, help. My fears about being caught didn’t last long, though; Keme had tracked back and forth so many times that he’d cleared a path down the center of the secret passage, and my own steps wouldn’t be visible.

I hurried down the narrow passageway—in some sections, the walls came so close together that I had to turn sideways to proceed. I passed an opening onto a small, octagonal room that was the top of one of the old house’s turrets. Leadlights on each wall allowed a surprising amount of light into the space, making it feel open and airy despite its low ceiling, and I imagined it would be beautiful at night, too, looking out at the trees and the stars. The last time I’d snooped around back here, the turret room had been empty. Now, a sleeping bag was stretched out next to a bag of animal crackers, a physics textbook, and twodifferent flashlights (one small, and one big). I stood there for a moment, my original mission forgotten. He’d been sleeping up here. Alone. With nothing but flashlights and a sleeping bag and the hard floor.

Okay, it was official. I was a terrible human being. Keme deserved better than this. The problem, though, was that Keme was fiercely independent—emphasis on thefiercely. I wanted to make things better for him. I just had no idea how to do it without alienating him completely.

But that was a problem to agonize over in the immediate future; right now, I had an intruder to catch.

I continued down the passage. After a few more yards, it turned; dusty windows gave glimpses of the back of the house: the twisted hemlocks, the waves breaking against the cliffs, and the stretched-out gray of the sea like a rumpled tarpaulin. The passageway seemed even darker after that glimpse of the outside world, and it only got darker as I moved farther away from the windows.

I passed a set of peepholes that, I knew from previous experimentation, allowed someone to look into my bedroom. (I’d addressed this problem by moving the tallboy to block them.) The next set of peepholes looked into the bathroom. (Yuck. It was the kind of thing that made it hard to feel sorry for Nathaniel Blackwood; I was starting to suspect that the creep who had built Hemlock House had deserved to be pushed from the balcony by his child-bride.) And the next set looked in on Bobby’s room.

In theory.

I mean, I wasn’t enough of a creep to try them out and risk violating his privacy. And although I was now realizing that I probably should have told him about the peepholes as soon as I discovered them, at the time it had seemed like a nonexistentproblem—I mean, if only Keme and I knew about this part of the house, then it wasn’t an issue.

Now, as I slid open the peepholes, I was starting to suspect that however the next few minutes unfolded, Bobby was going to have…questions.

The peepholes were centered on one of the long walls of Bobby’s bedroom, and they gave a surprisingly good view of the space. As usual, it was neat and clean to a degree that suggested military precision. (Not that Bobby had ever been in the military, by the way—he’d just picked up some of those undesirable habits like daily exercise, respect, and, uh, manliness?) What waslessusual was the blond boy who was currently rifling Bobby’s nightstand.

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